


for the love of pizza

by greekdemigod



Series: Shibden After Dark [2]
Category: Gentleman Jack (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Pizza Place, F/F, TW mental illness, Tiny helping of Angst, tw eating disorder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-13
Updated: 2019-09-13
Packaged: 2020-10-17 18:41:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20625722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greekdemigod/pseuds/greekdemigod
Summary: Anne Lister decides to use her powers as a pizza deliverer for good.





	for the love of pizza

**Author's Note:**

> hey all! this was originally written as a Shibden After Dark fb exclusive, but i have since changed my mind.
> 
> requested/dared to write Anne Lister as "a pizza delivery chick" by Mary and Leanne - and this is what happened because i didn't want to make it smutty as expected.  
this fandom is oversaturated with smut anyway, yall can survive one fic without ;)

Imagine this, if you will. A woman with an athletic build—track, not a ball sport—and a very tight white shirt. Calve muscles tensed as she pedals on her bike, racing up a hill. Coming down that same hill with a raucous glee, wind streaming through her long, long hair—making it wave out behind her. It will be knotted to all hell again tonight, and she will have to wash her uniform on a fast cycle as it is already glued to her back on her first delivery.

She is particularly fond of how it has become faintly see-through against her abs, showing them off even better.

Anne Lister genuinely likes this job. It helps that the restaurant is owned by her uncle, and her aunt makes some mean Italian cuisine, and the money doesn’t hurt either. But delivery service is a great way to stay in shape in her downtime and to flirt shamelessly with the women in this town.

She has two favorites—Eliza Priestley, a middle-aged woman that preens and purrs under her attention and is keen to invite her in when her husband isn’t around, and Ann Walker, a girl roughly her age that flusters at every low-voiced, honey-drawled compliment with such sincerity it takes Anne’s breath away.

Her mind has been on the latter a lot lately, for a very different reason than usual, but her thoughts have a way of flying away when she’s speeding through Halifax like this and they do not stick long. Breath in, breath out. The slight burn in her calves every time she pushes down with all her might. The heat of the intense summer sun prickling on her skin, the sweat beading in her hairline.

She is nothing but her body working fervently through the motion, down and up, down and up.

When she skids to a halt in front of Shibden Hall the gravel jumps with the most satisfying tearing sound of her tires slicing down to the packed earth beneath. She should really be more careful, lest the tires need to be repaired again, but it’s just so much fun.

She winks at Delia Rawson and Sophie Ferrall sharing a pizza at a window table. Not quite an expert at lip reading, she nevertheless picks up on Sophie’s “Here is trouble,” to her best friend.

Her mood is as high and bright as the sun outside.

“You smell,” her uncle ribs pleasantly, pushing her on ahead to the back when she tries to join him behind the counter. She fishes a can of soda from the fridge before she goes.

The kitchen is even hotter than outside, reminiscent of an Italian summer. Her aunt and uncle fell for the country and the people, but mostly for the cuisine. They go back every spring. Anne has been along a few times and loved it every time, so she gets it. But still, _il maledetto sole_.

“Ah, there you are. Just in time. This order got cancelled.”

Anne takes a seat in the corner of the kitchen on a slightly wobbly stool and leans back against the bricks behind her. She gets handed a platter of her aunt’s renowned-around-town mozzarella-avocado fries. Drenched in the hot sauce that she is handed for dipping, they’re practically inhaled, they’re that good.

“Who cancelled these?” Anne can’t help the offended tone—how could they? Never mind that she now gets to enjoy them, cancelling an order of these is pure idiocy.

“Ann Walker.” Oh? Just like that, the gnawing worry returns. “How many people did she order for?”

Her aunt shrugs, then hands her the tablet that their orders come in on. Anne sets her food aside for a moment so that she can start scrolling through.

While the sweat cools on her skin, she is engrossed in a list of names and numbers. She smiles to see Marian has been over earlier today, likely for lunch with her new boyfriend—that she doesn’t like, but she doubts she’ll ever think anyone is good enough for her baby sister—and John Booth had the supreme luck to go deliver something to the Belcombes.

Steaming in oregano, basil, sage, and thyme, Anne finally gets down to Ann’s order. Orders. Three fairly close together, all within fifteen minutes of each other, and all them cancelled fast enough that they hadn’t gotten started yet on the preparation. The last one, though, it took her ten minutes to change her mind.

What’s going on with this girl?

She has been thinking this a lot. It has been since the start of summer since she last had to be at the Walker house with an order for the blonde and her two best friends, to provide the dinner and snacks for their sleepover. It used to be she had to go over there every week for the three of them.

There’s been a few single meals, but those have become far and few between as well.

Her lip slinks between her teeth for her to chew on. Something about all of it feels so off that it settles like a heavy red brick in her stomach.

“Do you need this back right away?” she asks without looking up.

Her aunt pats her shoulder in passing. “No, go ahead. What I do need is for you to take a shower, though. You smell.”

“Yeah, yeah. Uncle James told me so.”

“But you never listen to him. To me, however.” Her aunt looks a little like an Italian mother sometimes, with her black hair pulled up in a bun and stern, maternal care. Doesn’t surprise anyone that Anne adores her so much or that she can’t be a little shit around her. Too much. “Go shower, sweet.”

She listens, but only after she has gone through Ann Walker’s order history and has scribbled down a few things. She passes the note through the kitchen window out into the restaurant, impressing upon her uncle exactly how important it is.

The loft above the restaurant is not inhabited anymore, but Anne sleeps here sometimes when she’s in town from college, and both her and John use the shower liberally on hot days such as today. She still has a few hours left in her shift, but it’s past the dinner rush so it shouldn’t be too busy anymore.

And if it is, well, it’s not like she has never picked up the slack because Eugénie was in the restaurant and John needed to make googly eyes at her.

She changes into a well-worn pair of jeans, holes at the knees, edges and hems frayed. Above it, a tank top with deep cuts on the side. She has found that no matter how simply she’s dressed, the ladies will be into her anyway. Must be her exceptionally great face. And her exceptionally great body peaking through the cuts and holes.

Looking at in the mirror, she pulls her hair into a low ponytail and checks herself for accidental tan lines, but she’s good.

She is so comfortably settled into the routine of picking up orders, organizing them over her regular carrier and the one meant to keep things cool, and inputting the address into her smartwatch, that she does it all without thinking about it.

If she had, she would’ve remembered that she knows the route to Ann Walker’s house by heart.

She takes a last swig of her coke and leaves the can on the windowsill that she uses to push herself off from and start gaining speed on the level stretch before the hill. Her pace is a little more leisurely now, wanting to look more presentable for Ann than usual.

At the crest of the hill, she mandatorily takes in all of Halifax that she can see. The church and cemetery where her mother is buried, the high school she and Marian went to, her uncle’s house by the lake. She feels king of the tiny world that is Halifax perched up so high.

Then she rolls down the gentle slope, picking up speed while her legs dangle from the saddle and she once more laughs with amusement. Life is good for Anne Lister a lot of the time.

She holds to the casual speed the entire way through and is only sweating minimally by the time she comes to a halt in front of the Walker house. Just to be sure, she pulls her shirt away from her skin and waves with it until the wind rushing through has stroked her abs dry.

Only then does she ring the bell.

It’s quiet for a long time. Even longer. She tries again after a minute or two, because she’s not counting, she can spend as long as she wants. Worry starts to settle—is she even home? Did she really set up this small gesture of kindness only for Ann Walker not to be home? She rings a third time and it sure proves to be a charm.

A tentative ‘hello’ sounds from the intercom.

“Hey, this is Anne Lister. Your usual pizza delivery chick?”

“Oh...” Ann’s voice sounds so soft and frail that she feels sure this was the right decision. “I cancelled my order.”

“I know. I’m not here for a delivery. I’m here to hang out with you.”

“Really?” A hopeful lilt, more like the sparkly Ann that she was so fond of flirting with. “This is not a joke, is it?”

“On my honor as a pizza deliverer, I promise you it’s not.”

The line goes dead and Anne is made a few more minutes, and then Ann Walker opens the door. She looks... disheveled. The smell of soap clings to her, but her hair’s messy, her eyes are red-rimmed, and she is wearing a sweater that’s way too big on her and falls over her wrists and knees.

She also looks so pale that she must not have been outside in some time, a stark contrast to the deep tan that Anne has built up over the summer working.

“I did bring some food. Maybe I did some stalking on your previous orders to see which your favorites are, but if I did, I’m not at liberty to say. You don’t have the right pizza clearance.”

Ann giggles softly, but her eyes remain wary and guarded, looking up at her through her lashes. “You shouldn’t have.”

“Well, I did. And since I’m the instigator of this date, I say we make a picnic out of it. Can we go into your backyard?”

A thoughtful expression dawns on Ann’s features, pulling some of the guardedness away and opening just a sliver into her troubled psyche. Anne feels dread and determination war each other violently in her heart—she has seen this before.

“I—you really shouldn’t have. It’s—”

“Is it because I paid for you?”

“No, no, that’s—”

“Is it because you’ve not been eating?”

The sweater is baggy, but Anne is perceptive. She can tell Ann is rattling around in it, Vonnegut’s bird cage of skin and bone. Twenty-four bones to be exact, reaching out to try and break through. The sweater shifts in the wind and it shows how hollow the inside of her hip looks, the bone protruding like a snow-capped mountain peak.

That’s not lacking an appetite. That’s deliberate starvation.

She remembers how Marian used to look: inside a mirror palace, outside a haunted house.

“Listen, you can slam the door closed on me if you want. I know it’s not my business. But—I care. God, I _care_.”

Tears brim in Ann’s eyes when she nods.

Their footsteps echo with distortion throughout the big house. Anne remembers the girl is alone, but never this alone.

The Walkers' backyard is... something else. There's a pool shimmering in the sun, a tennis court further ahead, an elevation of the terrace leading to a hot tub. That only goes to show that material things really mean nothing in the face of mental illness.

She does wonder where the hell her friends are, to be letting this happen.

“Can I tell you my theory? You can tell me if I'm way off. Or you can tell me to shut the fuck up.”

Ann's nod is very tight, but it's there.

Anne waltzes right ahead as they get seated in a shadowy patch under a giant willow tree. “So, my sister told me this when she was trying to make me understand how she felt.” Funnily enough, she takes the spoons out first. “Everyone has this daily amount of spoons to use, right? Someone like me, I have some attention issues but nothing too bad, I'm very extroverted and thrive on attention, so I have so many spoons and they recharge when I'm around people. The more I do, Marian says, the more energy I seem to have. That's pretty true.”

She brought cheesy bread, their simplest pasta with vegetables and no sauce beyond olive oil, and a small size Ben & Jerry's to share. “Now, my sister doesn't have that many spoons to begin with, and when she started struggling with the big D depression, those were cut down even more. Exchanging two of them to shower became spending almost all her spoons instead of only a few of them.”

Ann is not speaking, but she is listening, while her breath whistles through the vast cavern of her hollow chest.

“Food was also the first thing to go for her. Much easier to just sip water throughout the day. After a while, she didn't even feel slight pinches of hunger anymore, just—nothing.”

Anne reaches out to cradle Ann's face in one hand, thumb swiping to catch tears before they drop from her lashes onto her brittle cheek. “Tell me, am I close?”

The tears come faster than she can stop them, a salty wave cascading over her fingers. Her bony shoulders shake so hard that Anne wraps Ann up in a hug before she can stop to ask for consent. Ann melts into her though, crying into her shoulders.

When the sobs subside to sniffles, Anne nudges them apart again and hands Ann a napkin. Clutching it but not using it, she murmurs, “You don't think I'm crazy? Like I'm just—crazy. Or worse, trying to get attention because the dead parents card doesn't garner sympathy anymore.”

Anger bristles easily inside her, but she reigns the worst of it in, landing somewhere in the middle to indignant. “Who told you that?”

She waves her hand, and the end of her sleeve flaps along with the movement. “People.”

“Well, I don't think you're either of those things. I just think you're tired all the time, and sad, and empty, and no one is reaching out.” Ann looks at her with such wide-eyed yearning that it shakes something loose within her. “I'm reaching out. Give me your hand.”

Anne dusts a kiss against every knuckle, then turns her hand over and presses her lips to the center of her palm. “I'm here.”

Sometimes she'll come over for only five minutes, to give a quick hug and some words of pride and support. Sometimes she'll come over for hours and lie on her back in the grass with Ann, talking about art and music and the incredible vastness of the universe.

The first time Ann shows her the trampoline they will spend a long time on it, jumping and jarring and jostling together on it.

They will not kiss until a few weeks later.

They will not make love until Ann's chest is filled out again, until every slightest squeeze no longer bruises.

They will spend so many nights together, Anne holding all of Ann within her arms, fervently wishing upon every star that she can be enough to give Ann more spoons.

Might this not be enough?

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! still accepting requests at @ofbatwoman on twitter of curiouscat.me/kaymax !


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